HIV Like

Julie Tolentino

The way of the white patriarchy on the body andthe way of any masculinity that draws over bodies which are producing cells and losing cellsat once.

The blindness fought silence and for this we read to youYou who left behind to us the urge to fear less the writing of Foucault— a patron saint alongside Baldwin, Lorde, Glissant, and now, the urge to find the excavator, Karla Holloway.

Advances of legions, I mean that in everywaysecreting lesions take territory from the body, excavating deep, exposing a bone.That very take over throws nakedness down Second Avenue:I revel in the beauty of letting desire act out,relish in the dying of selfhood.

Inside the fleshwhile rotting and thinninghow delightful the sashay – the hip sending the thing to the wind, citing the temptress.While standing and rioting, how skinny the patience and how wide-eyed that fist.

Transport from in to out, noisy again, still blindwe see in black and white – texts desperate to not be forgotten in the faraway unwieldylimbs.Touché.No touch.Yes touch more touch.How is it to treat your touch as gold, as gift, as an emptying.

Go back and re-read.Resign to the multiple understandings of who we are and who you create in me.

What is that there?When did it seed?When do we accept that we are only (merely) rhizome?